'when we look at prehistoric talismans and amulets we are confronted with the first stirrings of imaginative processes. Here humanity began forming and re-forming notions of symbolism, ritual and ceremony in an entirely intuitive manner.'

"Legends are how we used to explain the world. Naming was a way of taking control of the landscape. We could never construct a myth like that out of the landscape now - but we still name it - we just use scientific language and describe it in terms of tectonic plate movements and other geological explanations for rocks, hills and mountains (in a volatile landscape like we have in New Zealand that story is being rewritten all the time). Needless to say we are still active mythmakers, just not in that old way anymore."

'Spaces such as the page, the plinth, the bench, the drawer, the body - and to a lesser extent the street - are understood to be connected to each other. The values and possibilities of one space are negotiated in the others, The body, for example, haunts the page the plinth, the bench, the drawer and the street; each space exerts a kind of gravitational pull on the other spaces, helping to shape the sense of what's at stake in each context.

If the street has a complex relationship o the other spaces because it introduces issues that sit uncomfortable with the artistic aspirations of the contemporary jewelry scene, then the world is effectively invisible even as it maintains an intimate relationship with each of these spaces.

While the world is a distant space, beyond the street, on the horizon, it's also close at hand, encountered when the jeweler leaves the bench and reads the newspaper or turns on the TV. The world represents the implications, responsibilities and possibilities of contemporary jewelry in the space beyond the contemporary jewelry scene,'

In an artist's practice, this grounding results in the creation of one's own mythology based on personal history, a relationship to place, a connection to local history, materials, rituals, and magic. Artists as shamans today intuit that the creative process is the most supernatural thing there is. They teach us not to be afraid to get lost and to create a belief system, not to brainwash others, but to stick to our mythologies."

“People hate the idea that Manhattan was bought from Native Americans for beads, because modern people think beads are basically worthless. But there’s really nothing scandalous about a sale involving beads. The presumption that the natives who accepted the beads as money were foolish comes from the person hearing this story and not from the story itself. It’s informed not only by cultural guilt but by our own modern sense of what objects are worth. If we accept that beads are valueless, if we believe that the native population sold its land for worthless trinkets, then it logically follows that we must malign the intelligence and integrity of the Native Americans who lived there. The cheapness of beads is a postindustrial perception.”

- Aja Raden, Stoned: How Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World

"When the jewellery object rationalises its own existence as you see it, interact with it, wear it, learn more about it (this can happen in many ways), that's a good piece of jewellery. But this can only happen if the object also knows why it has to be a piece of jewellery... Too often we have people making jewellery 'about something' only because they went to jewellery school. So maybe the object talks about something, but it doesn't in any way relate to the kind of object it is. That's when it's bad jewellery"